science technology innovation is developments from around russia. blog john harwood of washington d.c. and here's what's coming up tonight on the big picture at the debate wednesday mitt romney valid to bring america's coal industry back to life and do everything he could to promote plain coal one of the most unsafe industries in the world is the time of america will be away from coal and preventing future coal mining tragedies well as peter go to night in tonight's conversations of great minds also the unemployment rate dropped to below eight percent in september for the first time since president obama took office republicans claim the new numbers are being

manipulated by the obama administration republicans just mad that their plot to crash the economy has failed i'll ask our panel in tonight's big picture rumble anderson's daily take which you know it's possible to be arrested for trespassing on your own land well it is it's a sign of the corporations are turning america into a third world country. provides conversations with great minds are joined by peter gloss peter is a veteran journalist with over thirty years of experience previously he was the moscow bureau chief and international news editor for business week magazine as well as the executive editor of virginia business magazine he's also worked as a reporter at the virginia and richmond times dispatch dealing with environmental issues and as an investigative journalist peter got his bachelor's degree in political science an era of international relations from tufts university he's also

the author of thunder on the mountain death and massey in the dirty secrets behind big coal he joins me now in the studio peter thanks so much for being here with us thank you so much for having me and for those whose brilliant piece of investigative. and narrative i mean it's just it's a story as well as as well as well as a news story it's a story story what let's start out with april fifth two thousand and ten what happened on april fifteenth isn't illegal fifth two thousand and ten was a is a day right after the easter holiday and a mine in a month old west virginia owned by massey energy which had a cheap quite a notorious reputation for safety violations and environmental violations was under the gun to get back in working and at a bit known as a gassy mine with dangerous methane gas the mine had been cited many many times by the mine safety and health administration for safety violations and it was mining

metallurgical coal which has nothing to do with air pollution that coal is used to make steel and it's all almost all shipped overseas what happened i've never heard of metallurgical coal yes there is out and it's not burned it is part and choose to make coke and coke is then used to make iron steel so its bits like like converting wood dick to charcoal and then burning charcoal something like that but its use is not used as an energy source it uses a raw material for the steel industry in this case the global steel industry but in any event. miners detected something wrong at the mine strange airflow patterns. an arm broke on a long long wall operation which is a huge device that races a thousand feet up and down going into a mine into the coal seam in the middle original coal and apparently what happened was the company was under a lot of pressure to mine this metallurgical coal because. bad weather nostril you

had really increased demand and prices for met coal had gone up maybe thirty percent very quickly so there is money to be made absolutely especially if you could do it in that window before the price came back down because whether cleared up in australia is. exactly so what happened apparently after the miners were almost at the end of the shift shifts are usually eight hours. a ball of methane according to three investigative reports burst out the size of a basketball from the scene as a badly maintained device that rips up coal by eating into it with bits hundreds of bits hit a sandstone layer that threw out sparks that ignited a basketball size torch of methane gas something went wrong because the water that was supposed to shut off any such fire from happening didn't was turned on water was turned off what resulted was

a huge explosion probably called but caused by bad coal dust in keeping down coal dust and about seven miles of underground shafts were envelops. in flames yes in a sheets a cell amos yes shooting around going through the seams going through the the walls and the rooms where the coal had been mined and some miners were to decapitate it and those who weren't killed by the blast were sixty eight it. because all the air rushed out of the room how many people died twenty nine it was the worst coal x. coal mine disaster in this country in forty years or so. and this was the this was the mastermind yes it was a deep mine a massive the in the infamous one. tell us about massey mine. to energy massey energy. it was a coal company that originally began in. in west virginia. incorporated in richmond virginia back in the twenty's and you know was a union buster but had

a pretty fairly good reputation i saw the picture in your book of mr massey standing in front of his when he started he was told that he was the one of that he was the grandson of one of the founders and. he had sold his interest you know if seventy's massey was known by fluor and sure old dutch shell and put it like that and eventually when around one thousand in the early ninety's the massey family got out of that particular business they had set up as the director or the president and c.e.o. excuse me the c.e.o. was don blankenship notorious man who was an incredible numbers cruncher great accountant who grew up in the area but had a very very tough stance about unions and safety and major political donator. and and there you have it and he helped set the stage toward this sort of autocratic way of management that contributed to the stance so if don blankenship.

established the environment and set the rules that led to these deaths and these rules were violations of. law why isn't he in jail that's a good question because i think i don't know why i mean that's apparently the laws do not. are weak enough where they can't necessarily go after c.e.o.'s or directors of coal companies and there has been a an investigation of this by. by the u.s. attorney's office in charleston and it's only gone up to the lower middle management of what was massey energy massey energy is now owned by alpha natural resources of bristol virginia they were they were bought it up and you know and i or so and they and they have they bought it they bought a post yes and the disaster was april two thousand and ten the. directors of massey it led incidentally by former ns and i say

a natural national security agency director bobby ray him and former number two at the cia this man was the lead director of the board he engineered the sale after the disaster to well benchley alpha natural resources and then i heard twenty one. eleven sastre noon i interviewed eric schneiderman the attorney general for the state of new york he just brought a complaint of legal action against j.p. morgan chase for something that happened at bear stearns before j.p. morgan chase acquired them so in the banking industry you can go after the current owners for things that were done by the previous owners why not equipment well it's just the way the laws are right now in congress there is a lot proposed law that was drawn up by the late senator byrd of west virginia it's been buttressed and expanded by jay rockefeller senator from west virginia and this law would address those issues about making sure there's some kind of coverage for directors for c.e.o.'s and the like some sort of liability of liability or possibly

criminal actions so and so are they. is the difference between the banks and the mines that the banks have. have rules that make people vulnerable or that the mines have rules that make people invulnerable anywhere where is the outlaw piece of ice that's preventing i'm not sure that the point of the legislation i'm discussing it's nowhere it's been defeated in two thousand and ten when the rip republicans gain the house so there is no one right so there is no law right now and so they've not been able to piers piers their corporate veil and go after blankenship or anybody like him why i mean this is. you know these are twenty nine lives these are these are human beings this is. why. is it even possible that in the united states of america we can have the kind of conditions

that you just described. as as a normal course of business i mean in in this century in the in the within this last decade. how does that happen that's an excellent question because it goes to the face of what the united states were. it's to be i mean in china something like twenty five hundred deep coal miners die every year in accidents this shoot in this country it's usually around forty i don't know what the total is at this moment but it's just because that's the way it's always been and most of the deep coal mines in this country are in an area going from say pennsylvania to alabama and also part of little bit of the middle west the big mines from the west to say in the powder river basin of wyoming and montana are all big surface mines that can be dangerous but nothing like a deep mine. is is there you again in the in the book you talk about you show some pictures of strip mining surface mining is there a move toward that because it's cheaper because it's safe for the balance of the

environmental destruction i mean what what are the dynamics how do they decide when to do which and there's a certain sort of formula that people use it depends on what kind of coal you're going after where it is what its product cost will be what it was recently sort of surface how close to the surface it will be the problem in the appalachians especially the central appalachians of west virginia south west virginia and kentucky that the really value of the great great coal there that can go either metallurgical use for coking for steel or for thermal coal for. electricity power plant generation to say we mine maybe six million tons metric tons a year and i think about a million of that roughly symmetric metallurgical but the point is is that as the there's a two three hundred years worth of coal in west virginia alone the trouble with that is that it's becoming it's becoming available in thinner and thinner seams and the price has to be to a certain point and with certain conditions for it to be profitable in

a more expensive deep mine where the point about surface money when i was a child i grew up partly in west virginia in the early sixty's and i remember just seeing back then they'd been a strip mining you just go in and. get some dynamite blow off the side of the hill and get a few bulldozers and there you were and it wasn't even reclaimed you would see you know dozens of miles and one view of you know ripped apart hills that was rectified in the seventy's by federal law but now what's happened starting in the ninety's they started strip mining on steroids they call it's called mountaintop removal where you know we flew over for the book my photographer scott oh of course nine flew over we rented a plane and flew over. mountain sides one messy side that's the size of maybe fifteen shopping malls that goes across four five six miles and it's profitable for them to get that type of call in the certain conditions that's extraordinary more

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welcome back to conversations of great minds with peter peter is a veteran journalist with over thirty thirty years of experience previously he was the moscow bureau chief and international news editor for business week magazine was the executive editor of virginia business magazine and the author of thunder on the mountain death at massey and the dirty secrets behind big coal is here back to it i'd like to play for you a clip from the presidential debate earlier this week this is mitt romney talking about paul. and by the way i like coal i want to make sure we can get to burn clean coal people in the coal industry feel like it's getting crushed by your policies i want to get america and north america energy independent so we can create those so that you know this really raises a bunch of different issues clean coal is there any such thing why is the coal industry declaring that it's under siege. let's let's start with clean coal is

there such a thing as going call. it's possible i guess if you had the technology in the expense you know to to use whatever policies for. over a zation for carbon capture that sort of thing one of the basic problems though despite what governor romney said is that. when you talk about carbon capture it's difficult for the electric utilities to invest and get the money to invest. because on the other hand their rates are set. by state commissions regulatory agencies by states and some state laws say that the utility must use the cheapest available form of you know energy. and so that's one problem is that is that a problem because fracking has made so much natural gas available and natural gas is not cheaper than coal that's a key part of it because no one really expected this flood of natural gas from fracking which as you know is also controversial for other reasons but two things

happened last this past winter was very warm and stockpiles of course coal weren't used. fracking really got under way several years ago and really flooded the market with an alternative that makes it harder for bankers and the like to say ok i'm going to go with this more expensive clean coal. generated generating station. unless there's some kind of law that force me to do so or force the utility to do so and if you know if you're on the spot market and you're a buyer for electric utility and gas cheaper you're going to use gas so are you saying it's not the obama administration that has been hurting the coal industry if they're going to the extent that the coal industry is down right now i mean i don't know my basic feeling is that obama's come out with several things regarding this one was one of the proposals is to require more advanced carbon dioxide capture methods but only on new electric plants the old ones can apparently keep on

going which are going to last for decades well that's the other problem with the you know the coal industry says there's a war on coal led by general obama when in fact a number of the utility stations that they claim are being shut down by obama's regs if you read the clips a number of them were earmarked for closure anyway by their utilities because they are forty to fifty years old and are just worn out and not fix work not worth the expense of retrofitting or even running. well now you know one of the. this is a big deal four years ago i guess in the presidential campaign was that you know we haven't we haven't been building new refineries and when we dug down into that what we discovered was that existing refineries for much the same reason the rules applied to new refineries there was an older set of rules for the old refineries so instead of building a new refinery they take a twenty thousand square foot refinery or

a fifty billion gallon or whatever it is and they just double the size of it right on the site and call it the old refinery is that the sort of thing that the power companies are not really because the problem is is it takes years to build a new plant and another issue which has come up. is that there was sort of a you talk about green energy let's start with nuclear for the mix for a second ok until fukushima there was a thinking coming out that new reactor designs might be a way to go coal had been with forty five percent of our mix generation x. and nuclear twenty five to thirty then. fukushima happened in what march of two thousand and eleven that changed the equation and there are very few i think the southern company has just gotten to go ahead for a few nukes but they really haven't been any new nukes in this country and since the one nine hundred seventy three either and so that's that's a factor we don't know what's going on with nukes gas is coming on strong although that may end next year as becomes you know the infrastructure and storage become

oversaturated but to say that this is obama beating up on coal exclusively is nonsense. how how toxic is coal to america i mean if we were to if we were to say we're ok we're going to replace coal with natural gas assuming that fracking didn't have any right to it by a metal extra maladies associated with it which we can't but nonetheless if we were to or replace it with even you know. or. you know obviously non carbon fuel would be huge and. but but compared to the carbon based fuels what is called due to us well told us several things i mean this is it's important to realize that the difference between mining an occupational sense you know being a coal miner. and what you breathe in the air i mean there for example one of the big complaints about air pollution from the coal industry now are the mercury rules that of people pose when mercury is very toxic. and i know there was a new coal plant proposed in my home state of virginia it's now been postponed i

guess indefinitely and i talked to a state air pollution official there and he looked at me he said look if you realize the amount of mercury this new coal plant in near williamsburg would be putting into the air is probably ten times what we would normally allow under rules . and so they're ending any number of issues from coal they remember their difference occurring when you breathe it every day as a coal miner or what but obviously you know nitric oxide you've got carbon monoxide in mining you've selenium you've got a number of potentially carcinogenic elements and don't forget when you do mountaintop removal you use this mass trashing of the tops of mountains for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of acres you release a lot of that into the degree of the water streams now fracking is is typically cracking into shale exact which is sort of like a poor man's coal right it's. the same geological processes and that leads to one

of the really because remember you're getting the gas you're not getting a solid problem that that's where the question i was going is is isn't there an enormous amount of methane trapped in coal this just like there is in shale in fact isn't there exponentially more well i don't know the details on that i'm not an engineer but there are some thoughts that at some point in the future that you could actually perhaps burn the coal underground keeping all of the bad stuff underground but that it's going to be some years. that way and pull out a combustion products and use that as a fuel exactly but another thing to keep in mind is despite all the complaining about regulation coal still something like thirty nine percent of our electricity mix so it's taken a hit but it's not a devastating drive down to thirty nine something like that so what's the what's your sense of where we're going with this with with coal well i think what we're doing in the coal thing there is if in the far west like the powder river that's

going to keep on going and the issue is whether you start to export that coal for a member that's only thermal coal for electricity to the big markets in china and india that's a big fight right now in the pacific northwest how much of the coal that we are we mined in the united states is exporting. not much of the metallurgy core product and not much of the thermal product but i mean most of the metallurgical product we is exported and not that much thermal yet. but the big market if you look at the graphs until say twenty twenty five to maybe twenty thirty five the growth markets for both types of coal would be in china and india so the question is how strong and how sustainable will their economic growth right and and our and how long are we willing to be the mining pit for the rest of the world given the the environmental costs associated with that exactly and and and and the safety issue has there been a you know since the upper big branch. disaster it's massey mine disaster has there

been a move to make mining safer well from natural resources which took over massey bought them in a seven plus billion dollar deal in two thousand and eleven there are retraining they inherited something like sixty seven hundred massey workers and they put them all through a new training program and it often does seem to be a more modern company than the more recent massey energy had been and we don't know the results yet i mean east. alpha's had some fatalities this year but nothing like like massey and in many ways massey was a renegade company too in the sense that every time that massey would get cited by m. show or a state regulator they'd fight it to death and rather than fix the day fight it may just take them to court even if it was more expensive to fight it than if they didn't care that there was a way blankenship ran the company as a matter of principle he's not going to get out of it go to the good money it's

what about unions my understanding is that unionized mines are safer than non-unionized and such are generally tends to be true i would think because when you add the union and several factors first off you give the workers more power to strike if things are really really bad but the second thing the more important thing i think is that unions have safety committees they offer a nother layer of safety oversight and protection that would tend to i'm not saying union mines are or are safe because they're not but you know they the trouble with upper big branch and united mine workers was that. way tried to organize upper big branch three times and never succeeded what tactics did they use to block you well the usual ones but but some do in one case they kind of gave up after realizing they were going to make it miners to yesterday and they lost by think a very small margin in another election so the guy was really involved with upper big branch it was not a union mine. this do you see any technological i mean you know

most people didn't see fracking coming right and i mean it's still arguable whether never should have changed gave a waiver to the osha rules that made it possible but in the in the minute we have left do you see any technological changes coming along that that might make coal an option for those couple one is radio detection which they're putting in now which will keep track the locations of all miners if there's a disaster or an accident they know where they are and they can reach them. mr. other ones would be better. systems to keep coal dust down which apparently is what caused the major blast at upper big branch to keep that down and to surpass that in the third one would be if something really starts to go wrong to shut down the mine operation and despite the profit loss and do it really quickly and that right now is not a decision the government regulators can do instead they get sued by like what

blankenship did early specifics of what they can and can't do it obviously didn't work at upper big branch because that had been probably the most cited mine in the country and it just didn't happen but i'm so i'm talking more of a very real time kind of shutdown situation using computers and that's in the works right peter thank you so much for being with us thank you and for the great research you did to see this or other conversations of great minds go to our website conversations of great minds dot com. coming up do americans really want to giant at just sketch to be the next president because let's face it that's what the romney is we'll ask our panel if they agree in tonight's big picture rumble.

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